From the ArchivesA books-page columnist with the initials MC was in two minds about a change of tack for Irish novelists
I wonder when the new industrialism of this country will begin to manifest itself in literature. Heaven knows that the land has received its due in the last fifty years or so, and a great deal more than its due in the last ten of them.
I urged this point some weeks ago, suggesting that it was time for our authors to realise that Ireland was composed of other people than peasants, and that the fictionalised biography of a tram conductor or an insurance agent would afford a welcome change, and would help us to recover our literary balance. Now, instead, I venture to suggest that the national scribes might divert their energies to the theme of industry: brick walls instead of whitewash . . . oil instead of manure, and the transformation of the bullock into boots and shoes rather than his evolution into steak and sirloin.
President de Valera ought to do something about it. He wants factories, lots of factories, and he wants correspondingly fewer farms.
Why should he not take a leaf out of the Russian book and set our scribes to work on industrial propaganda? All he need do is offer a prize of a hundred pounds or thereabouts for the best novel on industrial Ireland, and I am convinced that he would get a most satisfactory response. Or would he? The entries might be excellent as novels, but, if the experience of the last ten years is any guide, they might be lamentably unsuited to the President’s purpose. Our novelists are not the most cheerful of writers, and, if they represented the life of a factory worker in the same hues in which they depict the farmer, the result probably would be to squash all possibility of an industrial revival in Ireland forever.
I have no sympathy with the people who contend that a writer has no right to blackguard his own people if he sees fit [ . . . ]. At the same time, as I survey the mass of gloomy novels that Irish writers have churned out on the subject of the peasant’s love and land, I cannot help feeling that it is the most lugubrious body of sentiment that any country, except perhaps America, has inspired. And if our writers have managed to make such a doleful thing out of the peasant’s life, what would they do with the unquestionably drabber existence of the industrial worker? If Thady Reilly, of the parish of Ballyslaughey, beats his wife when the cow dies, how much more thoroughly will Tommy O’Shea, machine-man in the new penknife factory at Knocknaganny, leather into his bovine spouse when the price of steel rises and he loses his job?
On the whole, perhaps, our Government would be ill-advised to tempt our writers to go industrial. Yet the idea of industrial propaganda through the medium of fiction is too good to be wasted. Maybe President de Valera could [set] up a fiction factory of his own, where he could employ a few capable hacks to grind out novels with the authorised outlook.
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